Welcome to Fox 3 (again), the MasterPilot Programmer! I say "again" because some of you will remember that I started this some years back, and then promptly ditched it. There were a few reasons for this:

1.) My MP couldn't be programmed on my new machine.
2.) Quickshot who were meant to supply me with the relevant programming modules to allow my software to download to the MP programmer, didn't and suddenly stopped corresponding with me.
3.) My Thrustmaster software, Fox Two and its various derivatives took off and took over my programming days :)

Recently however, after reading about other people's success in programming their MPs I decided to drag mine out of the cupboard and have a good fiddle. And sure enough, in Safe Mode and with switching my KBC input clock to 6MHz in my BIOS, I was able to program my MP programmable cartridges. Wonderful. A few days of fiddling with different files, and I worked out the structure to the MP .gam files, and that's all I needed to be able to write my own software to develop these .gam files for myself.

What Fox 3 will do for you - the good news.

1.) Fox 3 will allow you to produce gam files much more easily than you could do with the original Quickshot software.
2.) When you load up a file in Fox 3, you can see all the programming on the buttons straight away, and on all the modes, as well as choose to see what the actual key presses are for each button.
3.) You can easily move and swap buttons, and even complete modes of buttons with simple mouse clicks.
4.) You can program a button for more than one mode at a time.
5.) You can create printable gamecards to cut out and insert into your MP using Fox 3's Gamecard Editor.
6.) You can have to hand a text file containing all your key assignments for a sim and edit this.

But now the bad news.

1.) Fox 3 requires a minimum resolution of 1024 by 768. If you run your desktop at smaller than that (ie. 800 by 600) you won't be able to fit the whole window on the screen.
2.) You must as with all my Fox 2 software, have your screen fonts set to normal (ie. small). This though is the default for Windows.
3.) You cannot download to the programmer with my software. I'll investigate this one day but I doubt if I'll be able to find a way round this. So you still need to use the original Quickshot software + the Quickshot Programmer to download your gam files to your cartridges.
4.) Fox 3 can't as yet work out how much memory a file would take in your programmable cartridges.
5.) This is beta software so all the usual caveats apply. I haven't finished it yet, but it's at a stage where I'm now using it daily and it works for me.

Right well so long as you're happy with the caveats above, then by all means, please help yourself to Fox 3 above. This software, although copyright yours truly, is Freeware.

Installation instructions

1.) Download the zip and extract its contents into a temporary folder.
2.) Run setup.exe and let it do its funky installation thing whilst listening to some Mozart.
3.) After the install, reboot your machine. It won't tell you or ask you to do this, but it's a good idea.

That's it!

Notes on the Gamecard Editor

1.) This is one part of the software I'm going to revamp later. It's basically the same as the original Fox3 software I released a couple fo years ago.
2.) When you run it, please set up your Preferences (press F9 in the app).
3.) Moving and resizing text boxes: Fox Two Pro users will have no problems understanding how to move around and resize the textboxes. However, if you're not a Pro owner, just watch this animated image taken from the Fox Two Pro CD to get the idea. A little fiddling will explain how it works. Make sure the central image in the template is locked in position when moving around textboxes.

"Click for a larger animated image showing how to resize and move the textboxes"

Final thoughts

There will undoubtedly be bugs in this software, but it should work OK and I'm using it myself with no major problems. One last thing I should point out is that the gamecards don't give you a true WYSIWYG image. That is, the printed out templates may look a little different to how they appear on screen. I find this a little annoying so when I get some time, I'll see whether I can fix this.